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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WayneLigon" data-source="post: 2999550" data-attributes="member: 3649">The 'it was first' arguement still has a lot of merit, but that only gets you so far. I think D&D is a lucky accident with the right mix of rules complexity coupled with a genre that combines ease of introduction (almost everyone knows a little something about the middle ages), and the ability for the character themselves to Do Cool Stuff (this is why most every other RPG genre has remained a tiny niche: Sci-Fi isn't about you yourself Doing Cool Stuff - it's about what your tech can do for you - and in the other major genres (westerns and spy games) you're just a normal guy - the only other genre that offers tha ability to personally Do Cool Stuff is superheroes and that is a niche genre if there ever was one - too few people 'get' superheroes or want to have anything to do with them).That has proven to be a very powerful combination. There are tons of games with less and more rules complexity, and they've almost all fallen bv the wayside. Vampire's success was due to the same reasons: Ease of introduction (I dare you to find me someone that doesn't know what a vampire is and the basics of how it acts, especially since Anne Rice redefined the genre) and the characters themselves get to Do Cool Stuff (everyone knows vampires have super powers, and they look cool doing it). It became the closest thing we've ever seen to challenging D&D's supremacy. I've tried lots of different game systems and such, but it's hard to get people to learn a new system. Learning D&D is a fair amount of work and people don't like to see that effort go to waste, especially if they are a quasi-casual gamer. For the most part, D&D (before 3E) became no-one's favorite system but it became the only one we could all agree on to play because it was the only thing most of us knew in common - it was everyone's second or third favorite system, so when the time came to decide what to play it was almost always the winner because nobody could decide on anything else to play. Since 3E, most of the people I know are of the opinion 'why should we bother learning anything else at all?' d20 does almost everything we want from a roleplaying game and does it well. There's now enough in the way of variant rules that when we want something different we can play something different, in a different genre, and have it handled by a system that's fundamentally the same underneath. There's enough change that we get the feel of playing something different for a change, but there is enough familiarity that I don't have to reset everything back to zero to learn it.There's still room for other systems. I just came back from vacation with a friend. She and her husband are both gamers with teenaged children and they've been trying to find a system that her son's friends will play. D&D is too expensive for them, for the most part, and they still get confused with the various rules - they've tried running it themselves but the concept of game balance is something still very poorly explained in the rulebooks and it trips them up every tmie. GURPS is still way too complex for them - they love the Banestorm setting but the rules complexity defeats them. They tried Savage Worlds this week and they all liked it best of anything they've tried so far.</blockquote>

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